


things a mother must know

by neon395



Category: Dragon Age II
Genre: Angst, F/M, forshadowing, it's sad because we all know where this leads, mother daughter relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-18
Updated: 2013-08-18
Packaged: 2017-12-23 21:42:41
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 292
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/931397
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/neon395/pseuds/neon395
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Leandra sees the way Anders looks at Hawke, and she cannot help but worry.</p>
            </blockquote>





	things a mother must know

“I’ve seen the way that Anders fellow looks at you,” Leandra says lightly, to tease and to say ‘I know because I’m your mother’, because her Hawke, her first chick to grow and the last by her side, is happy, and so she cannot help but be happy too. 

But she has seen the way that Anders fellow looks at her Hawke, her baby, and while there is love, it is a desperate love; like a dying man in the desert reaching for water, like a drowning man grasping at the shore he cannot see. When the mage looks at her Hawke, her dear and her darling Hawke, it is hunger and want and love and despair so strong it aches to witness.

Because her Hawke, her magnificent child, is strong, with a seemingly endless capacity to love, but this one, this man who stares at Hawke like she is Andraste, like she is the Maker and the Sun and the Void made flesh, the love she sees in Anders is so full of grief that she knows, as a mother must know, that it can poison and harm and hurt. That it may reach into the seemingly endless well that is Hawke’s love and boil it to steam.

It will hurt her Hawke, her blessed and burdened child, who has learned to live with loss, not with love, and who has opened to the new warmth of it without knowing that the heat must come from fire, and that fire feeds and leaves nothing but ash.

But she is happy and loved and Leandra wants her to have this, now. For as long as she can. And when, no, if Hawke is burned, she will be there with a mother’s love.


End file.
